From Brin. Among his most important ideas. I've linked to Brin before saying roughly the same thing. Is wisdom increasing or decreasing over time.
The deep positive core of the progressive vision is that life has been getting better nearly monotonically for at least the last 500 years in the Anglo-world, and most of the Anglo-influenced world...AND that we should expect it to continue...AND that we should look to the future, not the past for truth/wisdom.
I agree (p ~= 90%).
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I agreed with this -- even deeply assumed it -- for 30 years. And, then I did not!
Does that change your 90%?
Or was I already composing the 10% peer group?
:P
past results are no guarantee of future returns...
Current "wisdom" isn't looking so great right now, and the steadily marching improvement of life in the Anglo world could very well come to a screeching halt in very short order.
Andrew,
Which part do you disagree with?
Monotonic betterness? If that's the part you disagree with, I think you're substantially more nuts than before.
Should expect it to continue? I think that's a standard, excusable mistake, I know that many/most smart people have explicitly disagreed with this for at least 2500 years, and they've almost all been wrong.
Future not past for truth/wisdom? Effectively, this is a result of the first two.
More data, before I change.
kx,
I'm thoroughly in agreement about both of your statements. Past results, and current wisdom.
However, it's also true that conservatives have been suggesting that we're going to hell in a handbasket for the whole last 2500 years (for assorted reasons, all of which seem to have made sense)...and at least for the last 500, they've been badly wrong. As an updating epistemologist, this makes me necessarily suspicious of my own curmudgeonery. It seems to me far more likely that I am wrong than that unlike the last 15 generations, my set of reasons why we're falling apart is actually right.
Rereading, I confess that I misread "life has been getting better" as ~"we have been getting wiser" monotonically.
It's the wide-range "wiser" continual betterment that I'd most dispute.
Consider
1) The lost wisdoms of colonialism: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/08/from-cromer-to-romer-and-back-again.html
2) The lost international arts of winning wars against hopelessly outclassed opponents -- and of generally having coherent policy goals in the world.
As to mankind's flourishing's continual betterment each few decades, I'm no longer sure either way.
Certainly I personally would not want to go back in time before about the late '90s (Internet!)...but I'm not sure most families of yesteryear "should" choose to time travel to today.
The social fabrics matter. Way more to most people than to me, even. And, I've been more & more admitting that they matter tons even to me.
"Nothing trades off against the social" within basic realistic ranges of modern choices like where to live & what kind of work to seek out.
They say that "failed social belonging" is the ~only suicide risk factor, and I imagine it explains a signif majority of intense disflourishing period.
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